Restaurants have long offered the convenience of allowing patrons to place food orders prior to entering the restaurant for dine-in, carry-out, and delivery orders. Traditionally, such orders were placed over the telephone. In this traditional method, a single individual seeking to place an order for a group of individuals determines what each individual wants from a menu, places the combined order via the telephone, and pays for the order. This conventional method has a number of disadvantages. For example, a single individual is required to determine what each participant in the order wants to eat, to manually combine the order, and to place the combined order. In addition, the order creator is required to pay for the order and either seek payment from order participants in advance of the order or after the order has been placed.
With the proliferation of the Internet, online ordering systems have been developed. For example, individual restaurants have allowed patrons to place orders online. An individual typically goes to a restaurant's website, places the order and either picks up the order or has the order delivered. While online ordering eliminates the need to use the telephone, the order must still be manually combined, placed, and paid for by the order initiator.
E-commerce systems aimed at facilitating group orders likewise require manual intervention by the order initiator to complete the group order. For example, one system requires the order initiator to review and submit individual orders that are placed as part of a group order. Such a system is unsuitable for food orders where the order creator may be unavailable at the cut-off time of the group order but may wish the order to be completed in his or her absence.
Another problem with conventional e-commerce systems is that they lack payment flexibility. For example, conventional e-commerce systems require payment for individual transactions to be made at the time the transactions occur, whether for individual or group orders. There is no capability of optionally allowing the creator or the individuals to pay for a group order.
Accordingly, there exists a long felt need for methods, systems, and computer program products for automatic online group ordering of food from a restaurant.